Madam, - The poet Patrick Kavanagh, whose centenary is being celebrated this week, as someone I met regularly when I worked in the old Baggot Street Hospital. He comes to mind often in our work because, like many of the people we meet every day, people who find themselves homeless on the streets of Dublin, he was a true outsider.
Kavanagh's personal life has been well documented: his lack of formal education, his difficult personality, his loneliness and times of extreme poverty in his flat in Waterloo Road, the solace he found in alcohol and the pain it brought.
Kavanagh felt an outsider in the country, and equally in the city. This experience is common to many people we meet, a fact that is often overlooked in our rush to resettle people and pressurise them to conform, to meet benchmarks and performance indicators - in other words, to be successful in terms of the norms laid down by society.
The importance and value to all of us of the confident non-conformist that Kavanagh was is well illustrated in The Great Hunger, published in 1942, and articulating great disillusionment with Church and State. Perhaps it is not surprising that it strikes such a powerful chord today with so many.
For me the enduring power of Kavanagh is his ability to compel us to question where we are going, to make us feel uncomfortable about a culture which places an almost disturbing emphasis on conformism, with scant if any regard for those who do not or cannot fit in. - Yours, etc.,
ALICE LEAHY, Director and Co-Founder, TRUST, Bride Road, Dublin 8.